In today's television-watching world with hundreds of television channels, it is extremely hard for viewers to find the television program that they will most enjoy. Current electronic programming guides (EPG) provide a daunting sea of information and it would take several hours to look through it all. Many viewers just look at a few favorite channels to see what's on, but this means that they miss many programs on other channels that they would have enjoyed.
With up to five hundred channels available to many television viewers today, it is too impractical for a user to spend the time necessary to manually search through page after page of program listings to find something the user might want to watch. If the user were to take the time to do a proper job of this, there would be no time left for actual program viewing. In practice, viewers today just look at a few favorite channels out of the hundreds that are available. Unfortunately, this means that they are missing out on many programs they would have enjoyed. Many viewers who do not want to take the time to look at program information guides essentially give up on using an EPG and revert to channel surfing.
What the viewer really wants when they sit down in front of the television after a hard day's work is to see a list of only about ten programs from which to choose, where each of the programs accurately matches with the likes and desires of that particular viewer. These accurate recommendations will have been automatically generated by the system and, in some cases, automatically recorded by the system for viewing at the user's leisure.
There are systems that exist that attempt to produce television programming recommendations but, in practice, most users turn off the feature because the recommendations generated do not accurately match with what the viewer really wants to watch. An automatic system that does not work properly is more of an annoyance than help. If the recommendations can be made accurately, then they will be very useful to viewers.